


Remembering you is easy, missing you is hard

by solrosan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Best Friends, Clint Barton Has PTSD, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mental Health Issues, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), dealing with mental health issues, the Barton family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 01:30:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21467833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solrosan/pseuds/solrosan
Summary: There's one thing Clint knows: Natasha saved the world and should be remembered.The problem is that he doesn't know how to do that.Luckily, others do.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Wanda Maximoff
Comments: 14
Kudos: 50





	Remembering you is easy, missing you is hard

**Author's Note:**

> Leaving the cinema after watching an Avengers movie, there's always at least one fic I feel I have to write. For Endgame, this was the one. I found it hard to write and I'd like to encourage you to look at the tags if you haven't already.
> 
> * * *

It was a warm day even though the sun didn’t quite break through the clouds. A soft breeze rustled the leaves. They had gathered in the yard behind the house, up by the great tree, to have a memorial for Natasha. It was the same crowd as when they had buried Tony not even two weeks ago. A few less.

Clint stood next to the black, slant headstone with a folded note in his hands. It felt weird. Natasha wasn’t here, she would never be here. He had left her in the past, abandoned her on a planet he had never heard of before, in a galaxy he couldn’t pronounce. She deserved a ceremony though. She deserved to be remembered. So here they were...

He thumbed the folded note, looking down at it. It had taken him the better part of a week to write these few lines, but he still wasn’t happy with what he’d come up with. There were no words that could convey what he felt, no words that could capture who she had been, no words that could do her justice. He hadn’t even known what year to put on her stone, so how was he supposed to know what to say?

For a moment he wished he was Tony, who could wing this sort of thing or Steve who seemed to always have an encouraging speech in his back pocket. He was neither, but he looked at his friends and took a deep breath.

“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “I know this place is a bit off. I really appreciate it.”

They all nodded solemnly. He couldn’t stall this anymore. He opened the note and read it, even though he knew the words.

“When Natasha came to get me, I followed because I missed her rather than believing we could do what she suggested. I went on a suicide mission because I thought dying with her would be better than killing alone.

“I asked her to not give me new hope, but she did anyway. It was cruel, but necessary because we had only one shot, one small chance, to succeed, and she believed it could be done. She believed we could do it.

“The world was never kind to her, yet she sacrificed herself to save it. She never thought she was worthy of love, she didn’t think it was for her, but she still… she… she still...”

He cleared his throat and took a deep breath. 

“She still gave her life to give us a chance to live ours,” he said when he found his voice again. “That’s how much she loved us. She loved us and she trusted us to finish what she had fought for five years to do -- to put the world right.

“I hope she knows that we did, that we made it. And that we love her. And that she’s missed.”

He folded the note, twice, and nodded when he finally looked at the others again. That was that. He was done and he had no idea what to do now. It wasn’t as if he was expecting applauds and he couldn’t dismiss them like a drill sergeant, so he just stood there.

He looked down at the smooth stone with her name chiselled onto it. He wondered what Natasha would have thought about this. She had never expected to grow old, Clint knew that. Every birthday (the one he and Laura had made up for the sake of the kids) seemed to have come as a surprise to her. One more year, who would have thought? They had never known exactly how old she was, but a year was always a year no matter when you started.

Except recently, when five years had been an eternity for some and no time at all for others. Clint had no idea how old his kids were anymore, but at least he knew they would grow older than they were now. Year by year. Hopefully. And he’d be around to see it. Hopefully.

Thanks to Natasha.

He still wished he knew what year to put on Natasha’s stone, what year would make the most sense, 2014 or 2023... But they had never known her birth year, so maybe it was only fitting that they wouldn’t know her year of death either.

The first to move was Steve. He stepped up and put down the rose he had been holding. Then he squeezed Clint’s upper arm. Bruce followed, then Thor. Laura came up and hugged him as the others, one by one, lay down their flowers at the stone. Clint held her so tight he was afraid he’d suffocate her after a while, but she let him. 

This had been her idea and he was grateful.

* * *

Clint was in a weird place. The untreated trauma from that day five years ago and his fucked up way of dealing with it was still there, still present, still haunting him. Every second of every day he had a feeling in his gut that he had lost everything and that he had nothing to live for. He felt it even as he hugged his children or made love to Laura… He felt it always. 

He was gathering courage to ask Nick for help, to ask him for someone to talk to, because he couldn’t go on like this. Natasha had killed herself to give him a chance to get all of this back. She had killed herself. For him. For all of them. He had to live and he had to live for real. But it was crushingly hard. It had only been a few months, but he wasn’t sure he would ever be able to reconcile with the fact that he had given up on ever seeing his children again and had been willing to die rather than grasping at the last straw.

When it became too much, too hard, he usually went out to the stone. He stood there, staring at it. He didn’t really know why because she wasn’t there, it was just a… stone. It had nothing to do with her. It had only been for show, or something. Because she deserved to be remembered. She deserved to be remembered by the entire world, really. She had saved all of them just as much as Tony had.

Perhaps even more.

So he came there when he didn’t know what else to do. He looked at the stone and he missed her.

“You were the only thing I had left to die for,” he said one day when he had been standing there for almost twenty minutes. “The only thing worth sacrificing my life for, and you didn’t let me. You were always such a… I would have died for you, Tasha, you know that, right?”

She didn’t answer, because of course she didn’t. She never would again.

* * *

Cooper had insisted on planting a rose bush next to the stone. Clint didn’t know where that had come from, because out of his three children, Cooper was the least interested in farming. Sure, gardening and farming were different things, but it didn’t make the boy good at it.

One evening Clint went out and dug up the half-dead rose bush and replaced it with a new one. It was a while since he had got his hands in the dirt -- he wasn’t much for farming either, to be honest -- but it felt good. When he was done he sat back on his heels and looked at it. It didn’t look at all like the first bush, but he figured that if he could keep Cooper from here for about a week, he wouldn’t be any wiser.

“How long do you think we can keep tricking the kids like this?” he muttered, realizing a little too late that he was asking Natasha. He sighed and got to his feet. 

Natasha wasn’t there. He knew that.

Yet...

“Don’t tell on me, yeah?” he said, trying to smile before picking up the discarded flowers and the shovel, and walked back to the house.

* * *

“We should have picked a day in June,” Clint muttered under his breath to Laura as they stood outside in the cold November rain, huddled together underneath an umbrella. 

Laura hit him in the arm. It made him chuckle, which in turn made her smile. It came easier these days, the smiles and the laughter. Even standing under an umbrella at Natasha’s stone in the pouring rain as the kids decorated it for her birthday. 

Two weeks ago Cooper and Lila had announced that they would throw Natasha a party. They had always done that. Every year. No matter if she had been at the farm or not on her birthday. They had done the same for Clint when he had missed his birthdays. It was tradition, and the teenagers had made it very clear that death would not put an end to it.

“We should try to put up some windbreaks for next year,” said Clint when yet another balloon was lost to the wind. He pointed in wide a half-circle around the stone. “Can’t be that hard to put together.”

“Or we can plant a hedge,” Laura said. 

Clint hummed. A hedge would be nice. It would take more time, probably, but it would be nicer. If they had managed to get the (third) rose bush to survive, they could probably manage a hedge. 

The kids were finally done and all of them sang Happy Birthday. It wasn’t weirder than it had been all the other times they’d done it when she hadn’t been around. Clint smiled ruefully when they reached the end. 

Nathaniel came up to them and took Clint’s hand when they walked back to the house.

“When we weren’t here, did you celebrate our birthdays?” Nathaniel asked.

Clint squeezed his hand and smiled. “Of course I did.”

It was a lie.

* * *

The hedge grew nicely in a wide half-circle around the spot where they had decided to put Natasha’s stone. Clint had cheated a little and taken in landscapers, because he’d hate himself if it’d turn out bad. And he wasn’t a fan of digging, which was what he told anyone who asked.

It changed the sound of the place, made it more tranquil. Laura put a bird bath next to the stone and since he didn’t build the windbreaks, Clint built a park bench. He placed it under the big tree, so that it overlooked both the house and the stone. 

Nathaniel picked pebbles whenever they went somewhere -- to the beach, to the mall, to grandma’s… -- and brought them there. When Clint asked him why he did it, he said that he didn’t want Aunt Nat’s stone to be lonely.

“What about Aunt Nat, then?” Clint asked.

“She’s not lonely.” Nathaniel shook his head. “She has us.”

Clint ruffled Nathaniel’s hair and sent him to wash his hands before dinner. It was a nice thought, but it was probably the other way around -- they had her. He had left her behind, beaten and broken and bruised. He had left her alone. Yet she was with them.

She was with him, always.

* * *

Wanda dragged him back to the Avengers Facility. 

There were few things he wouldn’t do for her, but this one was difficult. His therapist had advised against it. It was two years since the Battle of Earth, seven years since the Snap, he was doing better. The mornings he woke up believing his family was gone were few and the nights he fought Natasha over who got to kill themself even fewer.

His therapist had _strongly_ advised against going. 

But it was Wanda, so he went anyway.

Laura came with them. Clint didn’t let go of her hand the entire time they were there.

The rebuilding was well on its way. Wanda talked and pointed at different things. Clint loved to see how well she seemed to have adjusted to her life and missing years. 

“Here it is,” Wanda said, stopping in front of a huge marble block. On top of it was a brass plaque, with the name of everyone who had given their life at the Battle of Earth.

The first name was, of course, Tony Stark. Then name upon name followed, people Clint didn’t know, names he didn’t recognize (and a few that he did). At the bottom right corner, on its own row and a little bit larger than the other names it said:

_Natasha Romanoff, whose sacrifice on Vormir made everything else possible_

Clint pressed for a smile as he read her name. He knew about this, Wanda had told him already. And Scott. And Sam. And Pepper. And Bucky. And Bruce. And Steve. Seeing it was something completely different though. 

Her sacrifice on Vormir.

Her sacrifice was so much greater than fighting him on a planet in the past… She had fought for five long, lonely years before they even got close to a plan. If she hadn’t held it together, no one had got the chance to throw anyone off that mountain. If she had given up or accepted the situation like the rest of them, Wanda wouldn’t be standing in front of him smiling and Laura wouldn’t be next to him holding his hand.

Natasha should have been the one still here. She had earned it. He had not.

“Thank you for dragging my ass here,” he said to Wanda, hugging her tightly when they parted to go back to the hotel where they were staying. “And thank you for getting her name on there.”

“They weren’t that hard to convince.”

“Still.”

He was happy that he had gone, even if it meant two emergency calls to his therapist in the following weeks and an adjustment of the dosage of his antidepressants.

* * *

Steve died quietly in his sleep three years after returning from the past. The entire nation mourned. The entire world mourned. Clint was both at the private ceremony and at the televised spectacle. Thor wasn’t, he was somewhere in outer space and Clint and Bruce looked confused at each other and wondered how they were the two remaining. 

Bruce came back to the farm afterwards and they sat on the bench next to Natasha and drank beer. They didn’t talk much, because they didn’t have that much in common other than having saved the world on multiple occasions and the knowledge that when it was their turn to go they would be remembered the way Natasha was remembered and not the way Tony and Steve were.

They were both fine with that.

* * *

When Lila started college ten years after the Snap -- as the first Barton in history -- Clint couldn’t be prouder. He also thought he’d go insane having her on the East coast. It took a lot of energy to not check in on her every day to make sure she hadn’t disappeared again. At Thanksgiving, the first time Lila was home for the semester, Clint had a hard time walking past her without rustling her hair.

She let him.

“You know, my professor told me there are over 5000 named statues in the US and not even 500 of those are women,” said Lila, after they had dutifully gone round the table and said what they were thankful for. “Aunt Nat should have a statue.”

Clint frowned. “Of?”

“Of her. Like Uncle Tony and Uncle Steve. She deserves it.”

Clint didn’t know what to say. He blinked once, a smile creeping over his face as he nodded. Lila took a class in gender studies as an elective, and Clint had prepared himself for discussion about the patriarchy and toxic masculinity (and a few arguments between his oldest children), but this he hadn’t prepared for.

“You’re right,” he said. “She does.”

“I mean, all she has is the plaque Wanda got and no one is allowed to go there and the garden and it’s not like anyone else knows about that but us.”

Clint nodded. Natasha deserved more than what she got out of both life and death, no matter what she had thought about it herself. He hoped that he had done good by her in life, at least. He had no idea how to do good by someone in death, but he still wished that he had had a body to bring back.

He still wished he had brought her home.

“Uncle Tony and Uncle Steve got their statues like that--” Lila snapped her fingers and Clint’s insides cringed, his heart raising. “--but no one has even talked about one for Aunt Nat. It’s not right, because if she hadn’t gotten the Soul Stone-- Sorry, dad.”

“It’s fine,” said Clint, putting on his best smile even though he knew all blood had left his face. He inhaled slowly, trying very hard to at least not let it show that he could feel Natasha slipping through his grip. 

Lila smiled back at him. “You think I can ask Pepper to help me get a GoFundMe off the ground?”

* * *

The summer was hot and humid, and the air filled of sounds of insects. Cooper hadn’t come home this summer -- to his parents dismay -- and was working his way through Europe, and Nathaniel was under strict order to be home before midnight, but Lila sat at the kitchen table with her dad.

18,522 people had together raised $137,094 in less than five months through Lila’s GoFundMe. Clint hadn’t believed her when she told him, and he still didn’t. Stark Industries had been a large contributor, and Pepper had promised that if the goal they had set turned out to be too low, she would make sure they got the rest, but almost twenty thousand strangers had donated money to put up a statue of Natasha.

Tonight they were going through photographs. It was far too early to think about design -- they hadn’t heard back from anyone they had reached out to about where to actually put the statue -- but Lila was excited. Clint was excited about her excitement. 

They didn’t have that many photos that would do as a statue, but it was nice looking at them and in the abstract decide things like if the statue should have straight hair or curly hair. Natasha had gone through many hairstyles over the years.

Clint preferred the shoulder length, wavy one. Lila liked her hair better when it was long and straight.

“How was she during the, the Snap?” Lila asked, looking tentatively at Clint.

Clint sighed. He held one of the few printed photographs they had of Natasha. She was smiling, her hair crazy red. It was a few days before or after Cooper’s seventh birthday. Clint hadn’t been at the farm that time.

“Relentless,” he said, not looking at his daughter. He had told them very little about those five years when they had been gone. “She was the one who kept fighting for all of you. I wasn't around much, I… I gave up. Thor too. Tony ran. Steve did his best to move on. Bruce… well… She didn’t give up.”

He smiled at the picture in his hand. He had been angry at her back then, not understanding that she handled her grief differently than he had. He had been stuck in anger, she in denial. Or perhaps bargaining. 

He had abandoned her that time too, long before Vormir.

The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if the reason she had kept going was because it was the only thing she had. The fight was the only thing she had left, the only thing she thought she knew. Maybe she had been as tired and desperate as he had been, maybe she hadn’t been able to live with the disappointment of a possible defeat either. Maybe she had, just like him, seen meeting the ground as a welcome rest.

Lila put her hand on his arm. “I’ll make some coffee.”

Clint nodded, grateful for a moment to pull himself together. He put down the picture, putting it upside-down. 

“You know, she was the one who told us about the cigarettes you shoplifted,” he said when Lila came back with two mugs of coffee.

“What?”

“Do you still think she deserves a statue?”

Lila laughed. Clint winked as he took the mug she offered. There were so many memories of Natasha that didn’t hurt (anymore), so many that made him smile (now). Few of those memories was worth raising a statue over, but those were the ones he wanted to remember most. 

Perhaps that was what the stone in the garden was for.

* * *

Clint was asked to unveil the statue and he was nervous.

It had turned out the funding was much easier to get than the permission to erect a statue at all, but now, six years after Natasha had made sure Clint returned with the Soul Stone it had finally happened. The place they had finally got approved was in a park in Washington D.C.. A Russian trained spy was going to be commemorated in the American capital.

It was insane.

As were the number of people who had gathered to watch the unveiling. 

Those night at the kitchen table, when Lila had talked about GoFundMe pages and letters to politicians had just been a way to remember Natasha. A way to share her with Lila. Not that Clint didn’t think Natasha deserved a statue, because she did, but he had never imagined that it would come to it.

Statues were for people like Steve and Tony, not for spies and assassins, no matter how many times they saved the world. 

(“People with dicks, you mean?” Lila had asked when he had expressed his astonishment that this actually happened. 

“No, I mean people who don’t spend their lives assassinating people.”

Clint did not expect anyone to raise any statues over him.)

The Mayor of D.C. was there, she was the one who had signed off on the statue at last. Lila and her classmates had lobbied the poor woman pretty hard. It had probably helped their cause that the mayor was an immigrant woman like Natasha had been. Lila called Clint racist and sexist for thinking so. He didn’t bother pointing at the pattern of white men putting up statues of white men, because he somehow didn’t think that would land well.

The mayor spoke, talking about what it meant to be a hero and a patriot, about who and how we remembered. She spoke about Black Widow.

Then Lila spoke, talking about a woman with flaming red hair and a mischievous smile, about fighting against all odds and unconditional love. She spoke about Natasha.

_God_, he was proud of that girl. 

“...my dad, Clint Barton, the first Hawkeye, her best friend.”

Clint stepped up to the podium to deafening applauds. He gave Lila a kiss on the cheek. “She’d be so proud of you,” he whispered. It picked up by the microphone, but only carried a few rows.

He looked out over the crowd. He smiled.

“I have nothing to add,” he said, “but I want to once again thank everyone who has help made this possible, the two previous speakers most of all. Thank you.”

With that -- as the crowd politely applauded -- he turned and pulled the rope. The sheet fell and revealed the slightly-larger-than-lifesize bronze statue of Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff.

She stood with her arms crossed and her feet apart, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket. There was a hint of a smile on her lips and she was looking at something far off at the horizon. It was a really good statue, and even if he had seen it before, Clint stared up at it in awe.

He was really proud of that girl, too.

* * *

The sun was setting. Another day had passed. It was almost nine years since Natasha hadn’t come back with Clint from space, fourteen since the Snap. They had tried to come to a global consensus about time and ages, but failed. Most countries used one out of three approaches -- 1) snapped or not, you were the age you’d be if you hadn’t been snapped, 2) snapped or not, five years were removed from your age, 3) if you were snapped, five years were taken from your age -- but there were many, many more.

Clint still hadn’t put a date on Natasha’s stone. Her Wikipedia page said she died in 2023, but the people updating Wikipedia didn’t know the whole story. There was a statue in Volgograd -- there were four statues of her in total around that world now -- claiming she lived between 1984 and 2014.

It didn’t really matter. Nine years were nine years no matter when they started.

Nine years...

“We’re going to be grandparents,” Clint said, sitting on the bench he had painted red last spring. “You and me. Wanda’s pregnant.”

Perhaps they weren’t old enough to really be Wanda’s parents, especially not Natasha, but Clint sometimes looked at Wanda as his daughter. He knew Natasha had seen her as a younger sister. Wanda had called and told him earlier today. It was a surprise, she had never talked about wanting to start a family.

“I don’t think it was planned, but she’s going to be an amazing mom. I wish I could tell you about some great guy, too, but… you know. I’ll keep looking after her.”

He didn’t get an answer. He never did. Because Natasha wasn’t there. Except that she was. Not in body, not in spirit, but in memory and he held those memories close and dear.

And he was sure that she would be remembered long after he was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you liked it!
> 
> Lila's stats about statues comes from [this article](https://qz.com/1732974/new-york-citys-central-park-will-get-its-first-statue-of-women/), dated October 2019.


End file.
